Dell has taken the unusual step - for a PC vendor of its size - of toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft's Vista operating system and warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead for them. The step is particularly unusual because one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy.

"so the solution to this is to begin a new OS development based on one of the Unixes available out there..."

From where and whence did the notion arise that *every* OS must be based on Unix? Unix is not the be-all and end-all of OS design. It is not the case that any OS that does things differently than Unix is doing those things wrong by definition. It's not the case that advancement in OS design stopped ~35 years ago with the birth of Unix. Even back in the day, there was much debate regarding Unix vs VMS. And there were OSes like TOPS-20/TWENEX being run by major corps and universities. There was no wide consensus that Unix > everything. (DEC's mismanagement killed off TOPS-20 and VMS, thus ceding the enterprise OS field to the Unixes, but Unix's victory over those OSes wasn't based on a consensus that Unix simply blew those OSes away technically.)

Remember, Mac OSX 10.0 was horribly slow (much slower than is Vista relative to their respective predecessors, Mac OS 9 and XP) and had many deficiencies, despite being built on Unix. Mac OSX improved with versions 10.1, 10.2, and finally 10.3 (the first really good version), just as Vista will improve with SP1 and SP2.

(Mac OSX being built on top of Unix wasn't out of some belief in the greatness of Unix, but was a side effect of being built on NeXTStep, which ran on Unix and NT at the time. Apple didn't go with the NT version of NeXTStep because that would result in a dependence on Microsoft, but the NT version of NeXTStep ran just as well as did the Unix version.)

(Speaking of Mac OS X, I would've preferred that Apple's Copeland project succeeded, so that their OS wouldn't be yet another Unix, and there'd be a third type of OS commonly in use (besides Unix-based and NT-based).)

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the NT-kernel. Replacing the NT kernel with Unix kernel buys nothing, and is in fact a step backwards. But if Microsoft wants to make a new OS, I'd prefer that they build on top of Singularity rather than the ~35-year old OS design that is Unix.